the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism

On doing work that people notice

The Joy of Tech describes, in an eerily accurate way, the customer experience getting Free Wi-Fi at McDonalds.

This is really interesting to me because I work for AT&T Wi-Fi Services and one of my responsibilities is Software Release and Deployment management. I executed the script that turned 11,000 McDonalds Wi-Fi to free. Clearly these guys are responding to us--they even got the brand-new oval-shaped McD Wi-Fi logo, so they're paying attention.

Something we did got cartooned, and not in a bad way. It's pretty damn amusing.

I am still baffled by the notion that McD's is giving away stuff for free that makes people hang around. Does that violate their basic business plan, which is, move customers in and out as fast as possible?

Yep, as someone who works in a very closely related field, I can vouch for it-- that's real jargon, used pretty accurately. I could have a go at explaining it, but the last panel is the one that's actually funny.